Complaints Procedure

If you have a complaint or concern about the service that you have received from any of the staff working in the Practice, please let us know. We operate a Practice Complaints Procedure as part of the NHS system for dealing with complaints. Our system meets national criteria.

How to Complain

We hope that most problems can be sorted out easily and quickly, often at the time they arise and with the person concerned. If your problem cannot be sorted out in this way and you wish to make a complaint, we would like you to let us know as soon as possible - ideally, within a matter of days or at most a few weeks - because this will enable us to establish what happened more easily.

You should normally make a complaint within twelve months of the event, or within twelve months of becoming aware that you have something to complain about. However, these time limits may be waived if there are good reasons why you could not complain earlier and if we are still able to investigate the complaint fairly and effectively in spite of the delay.

Complaints can be made in the first instance either orally or in writing to the Service Manager, Miss Kim Stewart, or to any of the sonographers.

What We Will Do

We will acknowledge receipt of your complaint within 3 working days either orally or in writing and will offer to discuss the matter with you.

We will offer you a meeting with complaints lead, Dr Roy Craven, to agree a timeframe for resolution and to reach an agreement with you on how you wish the complaint to be handled and the likely period for completion of the investigation and response to you. If you would prefer not to accept the offer of a discussion we will determine a specified response period and notify you in writing of that period.

We will aim to investigate and deal with all complaints efficiently and speedily. We will send you a written response with a report on the investigation as soon as reasonably practicable. If we are not able to meet the response deadline we have agreed with you, we will contact you to advise why and negotiate another timescale.

All oral complaints will be recorded in writing by the Practice and you will be provided with a copy of the written record.

When we look into your complaints, we will aim to:

find out what happened and what went wrong

advise you what we will do to put the matter right

make sure you receive an apology where this is appropriate.

identify what we can do to make sure the problem does not happen again.